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On the other hand, to despise this Sphere, and the Gods
within it or anything else that is lovely, is not the way to
goodness.
Every evil-doer began by despising the Gods; and one not
previously corrupt, taking to this contempt, even though in other
respects not wholly bad, becomes an evil-doer by the very fact.
Besides, in this slighting of the Mundane Gods and the world, the
honour they profess for the gods of the Intellectual Sphere
becomes an inconsistency; Where we love, our hearts are warm also
to the Kin of the beloved; we are not indifferent to the children
of our friend. Now every Soul is a child of that Father; but in
the heavenly bodies there are Souls, intellective, holy, much
closer to the Supernal Beings than are ours; for how can this
Kosmos be a thing cut off from That and how imagine the gods in
it to stand apart?
But of this matter we have treated elsewhere: here we urge that
where there is contempt for the Kin of the Supreme the knowledge
of the Supreme itself is merely verbal.
What sort of piety can make Providence stop short of earthly
concerns or set any limit whatsoever to it?
And what consistency is there in this school when they proceed to
assert that Providence cares for them, though for them alone?
And is this Providence over them to be understood of their
existence in that other world only or of their lives here as
well? If in the other world, how came they to this? If in this
world, why are they not already raised from it?
Again, how can they deny that the Lord of Providence is here? How
else can He know either that they are here, or that in their
sojourn here they have not forgotten Him and fallen away? And if
He is aware of the goodness of some, He must know of the
wickedness of others, to distinguish good from bad. That means
that He is present to all, is, by whatever mode, within this
Universe. The Universe, therefore, must be participant in Him.
If He is absent from the Universe, He is absent from yourselves,
and you can have nothing to tell about Him or about the powers
that come after Him.
But, allowing that a Providence reaches to you from the world
beyond- making any concession to your liking- it remains none the
less certain that this world holds from the Supernal and is not
deserted and will not be: a Providence watching entires is even
more likely than one over fragments only; and similarly,
Participation is more perfect in the case of the All-Soul- as is
shown, further, by the very existence of things and the wisdom
manifest in their existence. Of those that advance these wild
pretensions, who is so well ordered, so wise, as the Universe?
The comparison is laughable, utterly out of place; to make it,
except as a help towards truth, would be impiety.
The very question can be entertained by no intelligent being but
only by one so blind, so utterly devoid of perception and
thought, so far from any vision of the Intellectual Universe as
not even to see this world of our own.
For who that truly perceives the harmony of the Intellectual
Realm could fail, if he has any bent towards music, to answer to
the harmony in sensible sounds? What geometrician or
arithmetician could fail to take pleasure in the symmetries,
correspondences and principles of order observed in visible
things? Consider, even, the case of pictures: those seeing by the
bodily sense the productions of the art of painting do not see
the one thing in the one only way; they are deeply stirred by
recognizing in the objects depicted to the eyes the presentation
of what lies in the idea, and so are called to recollection of
the truth- the very experience out of which Love rises. Now, if
the sight of Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries
the mind to that other Sphere, surely no one seeing the
loveliness lavish in the world of sense- this vast orderliness,
the Form which the stars even in their remoteness display- no one
could be so dull-witted, so immoveable, as not to be carried by
all this to recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the
thought of all this, so great, sprung from that greatness. Not to
answer thus could only be to have neither fathomed this world nor
had any vision of that other.
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